


Because It is Bitter, And Because It is My Heart

by cairn



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Backstory, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-15 12:57:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4607595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cairn/pseuds/cairn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quick drabbles about Bianchi and her relationship with her brother.</p><p>  <em>"They are alike, she thinks, when he stops playing and stares at the keys as though waiting for something more to happen. For surely there is more than this, the silent bodyguard waiting outside the door, the silence in the guest bedroom upstairs, the silence of the piano teacher’s absence." </em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is taken from Stephen Crane's famous poem, "In the Desert."

  
  
The first time she tries to cook for him, she is eight; he is five. Her mother’s cookbook has been discarded for several years now, the _mezzaluna_ she had always wielded with the finesse of a Michelin-starred chef rusting for lack of olive oil and manpower. There is flour, still, dusting some of the recipes, and she can see the spots that flecks of sauces have left in their wake. Bianchi can remember the taste of beef stew, meaty and whole, the homemade pasta so rich it only needed olive oil as a topping. Now her mother avoids the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, and any other room besides the guest bedroom upstairs that she has claimed for her own. None of the men speak about her. This is one of the facts of life. 

Her brother is an entity she is uncertain about. He is the cause of her mother’s disappearance; this has been evident since her parents fought with unstoppable force when her father arrived with a baby in tow. When her father hired a piano teacher four years ago so that Bianchi could receive lessons, she was aware she was the excuse for Hayato to receive lessons as well, from a woman with white-blonde hair as pale as her brother’s. Family legend says that her mother now cannot stand the instrument. Bianchi does not much care what her mother thinks anymore.

But her brother – this is a different story. He followed her around for a while (“ _sorellona!_ ”), until she snapped at him that she was not his sister, and he was just a ghost of a brat. When he broke down into tears, her father had yelled at her loud enough that one of his men ran in with gun raised in preparation to shoot. 

Even so. Every once in a while, Bianchi will perch on a sitting chair opposite the piano and listen while she does multiplication tables to appease one of her father’s ever-rotating tutors. Even she can tell Hayato is gifted, from the way he sits, the way his eyes shut when he plays, the way he can hum six different scales before he is three and the white-blonde woman leaves them forever. She can call out a multiplication problem and he can answer it, still playing. 

And they are alike, she thinks, when he stops playing and stares at the keys as though waiting for something more to happen. For surely there is more than this, the silent bodyguard waiting outside the door, the silence in the guest bedroom upstairs, the silence of the piano teacher’s absence. And when he begins again, from the beginning, she knows it is more to fill this silence than for the joy of playing. This is another fact of life.

His recital approaches, and Bianchi’s scrutiny of the cookbook intensifies. Her father catches her once, leaning against the kitchen counter, and exclaims over what a cute little housewife she will make. The hair, self-dyed several months ago, has been commented on, but not asked about. She doubts the questions will ever come up.

Her father is incorrect, as Bianchi is finding occurs with many things, and the cookies she makes, while they are perfection itself in principle, are so bitter that her first taste results in food spat onto the floor. She almost laughs, at how perfect this is, and though she doesn’t know the word irony yet, she learns the definition at this moment. 

When she wraps them up in cellophane to present to him, she wonders if he’s old enough yet to understand it as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A mezzaluna is a cooking tool that resembles a half moon (hence the name, which means half moon in Italian). It's a knife used in Italy to reduce large amounts of ingredients to pieces with great speed. There's a sort of saying in Italy, apparently, that a mother-in-law would give a daughter-in-law a mezzaluna and later in the marriage come to check for a circular indentation on the board, which would show the daughter-in-law was using it, to make sure said girl was feeding her son. 
> 
> "Sorellona" means older sister, but it's a sort of childish/intimate way to say it.


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
He’s twelve, and teenage angst has come too early. Red-faced spats with their one shared parent are common, and Hayato leaves the house at strange hours and returns at even stranger ones. Bianchi is preparing to sit for the _Maturità_ (three years early, her father says proudly, and Bianchi thinks, blank-faced, this is the only time he professes any sort of pride for her at all) and thus she is often awake at two a.m. when Hayato strides past her bedroom, fuming.

When she stops by his room, he is almost always poring over some archaic astronomy magazine he gets shipped to their house for reassurance, muttering to himself in almost-unintelligible English about some American theory, some Chinese legend, some ancient Mayan curse. It is very like their family, she knows, to lose oneself in something else to ignore the problem at hand. Bianchi has heard rumors about a boy going between certain families, looking for work, notable only for his white hair and the strange interest Shamal takes in these rumors.

She is almost – almost – thankful to Shamal for his repeated advances, because each time she stops her fist from connecting to his face he passes some tidbit of information about this mysterious boy and his sudden fascination with bombs. The bombs aren’t anything new – Bianchi has seen strange black powder on his hands for a few years now, and all the metal fastenings on his dresser and his lamp have rusted; her father’s men ignore the strange amounts of sealed ammonium nitrate that has accumulated behind the rat poison. The running between families is what is worrying. Hayato is desperate, and any half-competent mafioso could see it in the way he picks at the edges of his shirt. A desperate man is one that anyone could use.

Bianchi has killed a few men, and two women, by now. At least half of them were accidents, misguided thinking that her cooking was safe. Her brother, as far as she knows, has only killed one, and it wasn’t an accident. Shamal had accosted her in the corridor under the pretense of examining her short skirt closer up and had whispered in her ear that a man was found, traces of ammonium nitrate, traces of bomb blast, traces of footprints the size of an adolescent. Bianchi had inhaled, choked on the cheap cologne Shamal always wore, and smacked him for letting his hand graze her ass. 

They both know the red mark he’ll wear on his cheek for the rest of the day is for the boy who has become a man without Bianchi’s permission, without her approval, without even asking her for her opinion. As though he would have asked her opinion, she thinks over her exam books, as though he would have stopped by, knocking on the door for good measure, and inquired as to whether she could give her express endorsement to the death of this man, whose fault in her brother’s eyes is still unknown to her.

When Hayato looks up from his magazine, sentence still half-said in his mouth, he jumps and his eyes immediately darken. “What?”

Bianchi smiles. “It’s nothing.” 

He turns back to his magazine, ears reddening, but does not order her out. She sets down a mug of hot chocolate on his desk and leaves, not waiting for a response. The black dust on his fingertips is staining the magazine pages as he reads, and that is answer enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Maturità is an exam in Italy, comparable to British A-levels, taken after you've finished high school to basically indicate that you have 'matured.' They're supposed to prepare you for a job or higher-level education.
> 
> The reason Gokudera is speaking English to himself is because the magazine is in English. (He learned Japanese by age 14, so why not English too? He is supposed to be a genius).


	3. Chapter 3

  
  
The moment she knows she’s truly in it, truly part of the mafia now, is when she places a yellow carnation on Romeo’s coffin. Yellow carnations for rejection, she thinks, and how fitting it is (ironic – she knows the word now, age sixteen). 

Hayato is noticeably absent for this shift in her life, so insignificant outwardly but somehow so momentous. He officially left the day after her father heard of the dead man and the bomb materials in his kitchen cabinets, to pursue whatever life he decided to chase after, and Bianchi suspects it is the same search that drove his constant practice on the piano bench – looking for something tangible, audible, visible, to break the silence. 

It is sad, somehow, that the only time she managed to create something edible was for this dead man lying in a closed casket in front of her. A strawberry cake, saccharine and evenly piped with icing as pale as his skin, the taste far too sweet for such a tempestuous relationship. They fought constantly, tooth and nail, but Bianchi needed someone for a few months, anyone who could feasibly distract her from her family and her father’s biting remarks about her brother’s absence. 

He was certainly distracting. His slow way of speaking, as though even his sentences were lazy; his way of pausing just before firing his gun, eyes for once both open; the quirk of his smile when he looked at her – all of these things for a carnation. Bianchi reminds herself she will never be her mother – she will never, not once, allow a man to think of another. If she offers something, you take it. And she had offered him cake, a second time, after hearing that his name was more fitting than she had realized, and he had accepted. Hence the coffin, hence the flower, hence the black dress. Hence the thoughts of Hayato, for death always makes her think of her brother.

It isn’t his fault that this had happened, exactly. He was known for being flashy, in mafia gossip, but not overly sadistic or bloodthirsty. Her brother, the teenage mafioso for hire, was surprisingly not as cruel as she was. He, surely, would not have killed a lover who strayed. Then again, Bianchi knows he was too young to remember her parents’ fights, and she does not think he knows that her mother had once lived in a guest bedroom for six years before blessed relief came in the form of anti-anxiety medication and cheap wine that Bianchi herself wouldn’t have touched.

Nonetheless, his very existence is seeped with death – her mother, his mother, their father (and this is mostly figurative, except in Bianchi’s mind, where her father is well and truly dead and buried, only to reemerge from the grave in the form of a phone call that seems to forget she no longer speaks to him nor calls herself by his last name). The one man whose photo she has never seen. The several others that have reached her ears, the bus that was derailed by a bomb (innocent bystanders, she hears her father say, a memory from when she still listened when he spoke, can’t be helped), another boy about Hayato’s age. 

She knows he’s smoking now, and when, once, when she saw a crushed Marlboro in front of her front door, she wondered whether he had come to see her, as though he could stand to, as though when he saw her he didn’t instinctively touch his hand to his stomach. He was always too smart, she thinks. He knows to associate her with a bitterness, a sour taste, a danger that has programmed his very body to respond at sight.

A few weeks afterwards, someone will mention the Hurricane Bomb within her hearing, an off-hand remark about assassination, and she will deliver a very thoughtful, perfectly conceived pie for their consumption.


End file.
